In Still Wakes the Deep you play as Caz, a Scottish man working on an oil rig in the North Sea in the 1970's. This being a survival horror video game, the shit hits the fan, and all your old buddies and enemies start turning into fleshy tentacle monsters similar to the creature in The Thing, while alien growths begin overtaking the oil rig, ripping it apart. You never learn what the horror is exactly; Caz and a small group of survivors are focused on keeping the oil rig from capsizing, which means you'll be crawling through flooded chambers, climbing wet towers, and hide in vents as you attempt to advert total catastrophe. Caz keeps hallucinating interactions with his wife Suz, who he abandoned while on the run from the law after a barfight turned bad. The dialogue and crew interactions are highlights; Still Wakes the Deep is more like an interactive film than a stealth-action sneaker, a la Alien Isolation. Although you'll hide from several monsters, most of the time you'll just traverse the wreckage of the rig. All of this is rendered in Unreal Engine 5, and while it's not quite as impressive as Hellblade 2, the lighting and water effects are really cool, and I found myself frequently pausing to take screenshots. For some reason, the Game Pass version of Still Wakes the Deep doesn't support DLSS upscaling, so I had to use UE5's TSR upscaling, which looks good most of the time, although there will be some blurriness on occasion. Still Wakes the Deep is a very short game, lasting only five hours or so, but it's an excellent narrative experience, and I found it on par with Hellblade 2. Is 2024 the year of walking simulators?
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